Crazy is as
crazy does. It’s a commedia dell’arte, the Venice Film Festival. An annual comedy
of art and the arts. But at its best – and you get some of the best every
year – it’s something more. A different kind of comedy, even two kinds. A
titanic play-off between a commedia divina – up there with God and Dante – and a commedia buffa, down
there with Harlequin and Mr Punch.

The event
reached seventy this year. “70. Future Reloaded,” proclaimed the poster. And
with an opening movie, GRAVITY, that yoyo’d George
Clooney and Sandra Bullock in space, the festival started by aspiring to heaven.

George and
Sandra dance about in an action-packed void; they claw the stars and
cross-talk in the cosmos. Then, in person, the Clooney-Bullock show descended
to the slightly less off-world dimension of a Venice press conference. Sandra
explained to us how she hung from a ceiling by wires for days on end,
feigning weightlessness. George explained how he, personally, has machinery
hovering in space right now. It’s to monitor Sudan’s human rights
violations….Oh, George, not now, that’s another story altogether. In Venice
you’re an ambassador for Hollywood, not Unesco.

“Another
story.” Ah yes! Isn’t that the definition of a film festival and its wares?
You don’t like one story, here’s another. Or a hundred others. Venice does
this better than anywhere but Cannes, and sometimes even Cannes can’t equal
it for multi-story moviethons.

If narrative
cinema is in crisis, as some cine-buffs think, including Paul Schrader,
expatiating to camera in his contribution to the shorts anthology feature
(also called FUTURE RELOADED) that was commissioned for Venice’s 70-year
jubilee, you wouldn’t know it from the 2013 festival. (Schrader, also serving
as a festival juror, thinks rapid technological changes in cinema will soon
knock the ‘story’ out of whack and orbit).

Well, this
year’s storytellers spun some damn good yarns. Best early show was Hayao Miyazaki’s THE WIND RISES. The great Japanimator whose SPIRITED AWAY
is the gold standard for animes, brought
the festival his new opus. Depending on your view it was either (a) a masterpiece
confirming Miyazaki’s genius or (b) an insult to Allied servicemen of World
War 2 and the women who loved them.

You’ve really
got to say it’s both. (Art is complicated). Miyazaki has some nerve, many
opined showing in the west (perhaps it’s less offensive in ex-Axis Italy) a
fantasised biopic based on the life of Japanese aircraft designer JiroHorikoshi. Horikoshi created the ace fighter planes for the Jap war
effort.

Miyazaki
doesn’t spare the horrors, wartime or pre-war. The 1923 Kanto earthquake –
blisteringly real – sets up the carnage of 1939-45. But don’t expect a mea culpa from Hayao
on Hirohito’s behalf. Then again, the filmmaker might say: 70 years have gone
by; Japan got the rough retribution of Hiroshima; and the film’s hero is a very fictionalised Jiro.

THE WIND
RISES is an almost abstract paean to the madness of art and the passion of
craftsmanship, a madness than can call down tragedy.
Jiro falls in love with a beautiful girl met first
during the earthquake, later as a young painter and tuberculosis victim. The
illness was epidemic in Japan in the years of the story. As a theme it is
poignantly addressed, partly through the image of an opened white umbrella
(surely a symbol of the human lung?) whose errant,
wayward flight, escaping on a windy day in the country, first reunites boy
and girl.

Other flying
sequences – the airplanes, ranging from slim-and-birdlike to monstrous and
bellicose – are more menacing. Miyazaki has an unequalled sense of the
grotesque, morphing into the apocalyptic. The movie ends with two eloquently
contrasting sequences. One is a ‘happy’ conclusion for the world, the
characters, the audience. The other is an infernal
after-landscape of war, a countryside littered with metal corpses of planes,
crisped by fire, jagged with destruction, bleeding oil like human blood. When
Miyazaki isn’t being wistful or poetic, he can approach the power of the
Picasso of ‘Guernica.’

On the Sunday
of the Venice Film Festival the filmmaker announced his retirement. THE WIND
RISES will, he says, be his last feature. Let’s hope not. Some directors
‘retire’ several times, turning out bonus masterworks in the interim.

What about
Dame Judi Dench? Will she retire? Since getting shot as James Bond’s M, she
has made PHILOMENA for Stephen Frears. Venice went
dotty for this sentimental charmer. ‘Phil’ herself is based on a true, now
elderly Irishwoman who lost her baby after a teenage pregnancy. It was
snatched away and sold to rich American foster parents by the Magdalene-style
nuns with whom Philomena was boarded. Half a century later the bereaved mom
called on English journo Martin Sixsmith (dapperly
played by Steve ‘Alan Partridge’ Coogan, who
co-wrote the script) to help her find her son. She does find him, after a
fashion. But the fashion blends a little tragedy with the triumph.

Dench and Coogan are a terrific double act: the wry, seen-it-all
newspaperman and the bubbly, emotional biddy clutching at straws whenever
they fly by. It transpires that her son is, or was, gay. That doesn’t faze
Phil. She guessed it when he was a tot. He was more observant and sensitive,
she says, more responsive than the other tots orphaned – or soon to be – by
those mercenary sisters ready to turn the products of young girls’
promiscuity into a payday for Catholic piety.

What a
crowd-pleaser. PHILOMENA got a sustained spate of applause. Some other Venice
movies got a sustained silence interspersed with catcalls or whistles. A
troika of movies by other English-speaking directors was bad enough to
suggest they had all piled into the same sleigh, headed for a cliff marked “Overreacher’s Fall”.

Jonathan
Glazer crafts a sci-fi nightmare involving Scarlett Johansson as a man-eating
alien wandering Scotland. This will do nothing for the repute of a director who
kicked off 13 years ago with the marvellous SEXY BEAST. Terry Gilliam’s THE
ZERO THEOREM is a futuristic brainstorm, garishly overdesigned by the
ex-Monty Python animator and starring a bald-wigged, bodysuit-swollen Christoph Waltz, playing a computer boffin who seeks the
meaning of life, God, the universe.

We all know
and love James Franco. He has become a jack-the-lad of all trades. In Venice
he cameo-appeared here, there, hic et ubique. He was in a Sam Fuller tribute documentary
(daughter Samantha Fuller’s A FULLER LIFE), reading a gobbet from Sam’s
autobiography, and his own new auteur work CHILD OF GOD, based on a Cormac
McCarthy novella. This movie is a mishap, like his Cannes-shown Faulkner
adaptation AS I LAY DYING. Ham plus over-egging in the deep south. Franco
also contributed a forgettable short to VENICE 70 FUTURE RELOADED. Never
mind. I still love him. He will learn. And no one boating to/from St Mark’s
Square could ignore his blown-up face, radiant with charisma, on the giant
Gucci poster fronting the lagoon.

Weird
crossover artists, novices and outsiders have ­always swollen the army of
directors at Venice. Look at Britain’s Steven Knight, best known for
inventing the TV game show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ First, a few
years ago, he scripted Stephen Frears’s DIRTY
PRETTY THINGS. Now he has written and directed his own feature, the
fascinating LOCKE.

A man with a
Welsh accent (Tom Hardy) drives through the night towards London, his life
fragmenting around him like an exploding star. The very imagery – the little
detonations and flickerings-by of motorway lights
and signs – suggests an apocalypse in earthly space. This drama is a one-man
show: just Hardy, bearded, restless, wakeful-eyed yet a little punch-drunk
with lack of sleep. He soothes or parries, with a patience born of
desperation, the voices that bombard him from the car telephone. The mistress
about to have his child in a London hospital; the wife panicking at his
excuses for not coming home; his boss and his subordinate for “the biggest
concrete pour in Europe”, a skyscraper foundation-laying which – tomorrow
morning – he is supposed to supervise as site manager.

He won’t be
there: the work colleagues are going ballistic. He won’t be coming home: the
wife and kids are imploding. He doesn’t even love the one-night-stand woman
now making him a father: “I hardly know you….” For reassurance, or extra
weirdness, he talks to his imagined father in the car’s back seat. The movie
is a tour de force about the force
of destiny. ‘Locke’ (Hardy) has made a moral or existential decision. He is a
man adrift, unmoored, floating in a galaxy – yes,
that space imagery again – where everyone, except himself, can hear him
scream. He is at war, at peace, at the turning point.

LOCKE wasn’t
in competition. (Festival director Alberto Barbera
later said he regretted this decision. He put Gilliam’s THE ZERO THEOREM in
instead, to amp up the celebrity quotient). Nor was
Alex Gibney’s THE ARMSTRONG LIE in competition,
though it was the best nonfiction on the fringe.Here is another story of an imploding life.
Right in the middle of this doc’s making the world’s top sports pedaller – yes, the Armstrong is Lance – was caught
peddling lies.

He had taken
dope, yes, and more dope. First he told Oprah Winfrey, then
he had to tell Alex. The director of ENRON, MEA MAXIMA CULPA (Catholic
pederasty) and WE STEAL SECRETS (WikiLeaks) is
hardly going to run screaming from his clapperboard. Scandal is Gibney’s meat and potatoes. So he and we stick around,
having earned the scandal grub after all that clambering up Alps with the
sweaty wheel-turner. The initial diet of idolatry, which Gibney
seems rather surprisingly to have signed on for, changes to a more appetising
repast of “Crikey!” and “No, really?” and “He did?” and “Shocking but
riveting.”

Another
American documentarist, Errol Morris, did get into the Venice competition.
(Don’t ask me the logic; ask Signor Barbera). Maybe
it was thought that an intense, well-nourished, squinty-eyed US ex-Defence
Secretary, one Donald Rumsfeld, the subject of Morris’s THE UNKNOWN KNOWN,
would be better meat for a hungry Golden Lion than a stringy cyclist.

This film is
THE FOG OF WAR again with a different Pentagon chief being star-chambered for
a different war. For McNamara and Vietnam, read Rumsfeld and Iraq. Morris
tries to climb all over the man who sent troops into ex-Mesopotamia, then
left them for years as Abu Ghraib, roadside bombs and suicide killings
exploded across US newspapers.

Rumsfeld
won’t be climbed over, though. He’s tricky. He survived the ire of Richard M
Nixon and the White House tapes. (“Donald Rumsfeld may not be long for this
world”, growled the three-day beard with the ski-slope nose). He survived the
leapfrogging of one-time assistant Richard Cheney. He, Rumsfeld, still looks
spry and he is still clever, even funny. When Morris tries to tangle him in
his own mad wordsmithing – Rumsfeld’s “unknown knowns” and “known unknowns” – the victim pretty much
tangles the interrogator back. A bizarre chemistry grows between the two. The
film starts to look like promising material for a sitcom or romcom. WHEN MORRY MET RUMMY. (Which man will get to do
the diner orgasm scene? “I’ll have what he’s having”?)

It wasn’t all
fun and games and famous names at Venice. It was that, of course. What’s a red carpet without the likes of
Scarlett Johansson, Nic Cage, Jimmy Franco, Clooney
and Bullock and – oh we lost count. But as well as the known knowns, there are the soon-to-be-known unknowns, and even
the knownswhom we thought
we knew but in whom we now find much unknown.

Would you
believe, for instance, that a Malaysian-born Taiwan filmmaker who won the
Golden Lion in 1994, with a movie called VIVE L’AMOUR, and has since mimicked
himself with ever-dwindling returns, turning out rain, destitution and
downbeat eroticism (THE RIVER, THE HOLE)– could you believe he would make, or make again, a masterpiece?

But Tsai Ming
Liang’s STRAY DOGS is that. It’s a gleaming-rich film about poverty. It’s an
aesthetic balancing act between tragedy and comedy. Tsai’s favourite actor
Lee Kang-Sheng was never more commanding. The features may have aged from
VIVE L’AMOUR’s pretty-boy scamp to something more like Edward G Robinson gone
oriental. But he brings ceaseless emotional weather-changes to a man wearing,
or trying to wear, for his family’s sake, a mask of stoicism. Dad to two
mother-abandoned kids, he bread-wins by standing in
Taipei traffic as a human billboard. Hours on end in wind and rain. A
homeless man advertising homes.

The family
moves its bedroom from hovel to hovel. Mostly they squat in one derelict maze
of dripping concrete, resembling, though it isn’t, an abandoned cinema. (Tsai
loves these. Remember GOODBYE DRAGON INN?) The little daughter buys a
supermarket cabbage which she shapes into the red-crayon-featured head of a
sleeping-companion doll, bodied out with plumped-up clothes. “Miss Big
Boobs!” the siblings giggle hysterically as they bed it in.

Falling off
the wagon one night, dad drunkenly tries to smother the cabbage, then kisses
it passionately, then munches it with mad angst, at great length, down to its
tattered stem. What a scene. (The audience was hysterical).

Wasted lives
brought to a pitch of crazed, self-reinventing nihilism. A middle-aged
supermarket manageress prowls the same building at night feeding stray dogs –
an eerie-lit pack – with the day’s leftover shop meat. A beautiful landscape mural(found by the director in this concrete
maze, apparently the work of a fly-by-night Leonardo) entrances each
character by turn, though some homages are weirder than others. The
supermarket woman lowers her knickers and pisses before it. An extended,
shall we say, libation. Later in a static, silent 14-minute shot – yes, 14
minutes—Kang-Sheng stands before the mural with a fellow character who might
be his ex-wife. They are mute and motionless save for a tear which once
descends the woman’s face and for the anguished weather-changes storming
across Kang-Sheng’s features.

The mural
represents the possibility and impossibility of hope. An evergreen landscape
in one that will never, it seems, burgeon.... The audience was rapt as if
hypnotised during this shot. A dropped pin would have caused an
earthquake.

Yup. Crazy is
as crazy does. Hope springs paternal—mad hope—even in a place as economically
orphaned as slumland Taipei or as aesthetically
orphaned as the Venice Film Festival this year. Well, it looked a bit orphaned. Frugality was the flavour. Last year’s
décor still clung to the Palazzo del Cinema frontage, still resembling – flamboyantly
but now a little remorselessly—a samurai fort dyed bright scarlet and covered
with sponsors’ names.

Frankly,
Scarlet, we don’t give a damn. Let’s hope this doesn’t harbinger more
stressful economies, ones that could affect the quality and variety of
movies. Those are what we come to this Mostra for.
Those and weird surprises.

Take
Gianfranco Rosi’s SACRO GRA. For 20 minutes it
looks like a piece of crackpot Italiana, fit for
the curio shelf or the museum. Rosi, an ethno-documentarist who previously ‘did’ India (BOATMEN), the
American desert (BELOW SEA LEVEL) and Mexico (EL SICARIO), now does Rome’s
famous ring road. The GRA or Grande RaccordoAnulare. Rosi and his camera
chase down odd, interesting folk working or living around the road: a River Tiber
eel fisherman, a castle owner who rents his pile for movie shoots, a veteran
ambulance paramedic commuting between crashes.

Gradually
human colours fill in the film’s dour setting. And its initially
diffuse-seeming structure. These people dwell in a rootless place at whose
heart, or in whose threading artery, is noise, motion, impermanence.

These lives
are as solid only as the transient locale they live in. At the same time they
share its fugitive trajectories of hope. Most memorable oddball is the tree
surgeon, a boffin we first catch drilling palms for weevil infestation. He is
fascinated – we too – by the paradox that an excess of life can kill a life’s
host, rather as the overpopulated GRA has become a ring of death or eerie,
phantom life-simulation.

This tree
geek gets carried away by the metaphorical possibilities of his own work. In one scene, listening through a digital
device to the screamy nattering of larvae (which we
also hear), he transportedly soliloquises: ”The sound of the orgy. The repulsive feast. The sound
of humans in a restaurant….!” By the close of SACRO GRA, the film has become
more than a documentarist’s FELLINI ROMA. It’s a
little Fellinian itself, and more than a little
fantastical.

Guess what.
Jury president Bernardo Bertolucci’s judging panel gave it the Golden Lion. A
few leonine roars of anger greeted the announcement. Some festivalgoers
thought it a lightweight winner. Seconds before, they had watched the
director of their Lion favourite,
Tsai Ming Liang of STRAY DOGS, collect the runner-up
Special Jury Prize. With a grace and brio beyond the call, Tsai turned to the
jurors and said, “Can I tell you something? I love you all.”

Great is the
love that survives filmfest jury decisions.
Bernardo and Co also planted two kisses on Greece’s MISS VIOLENCE—Best
Director for AlexandrosAvarnas
and Best Actor for Themis Panou—even though this
incest drama starts clever and ends clunky. Philip Groning
got booed when the German Regisseurcollected
a minor Jury Prize for THE POLICE OFFICER’S WIFE. It wasn’t Groning’s fault that the gong gang overrated his weird
3-hour spouse-bashing epic, full of so many captioned chapter headings –
nearly sixty – that you got reading fatigue.

Why was
domestic abuse the apparent dish of the Venice season? Even the Best
Screenplay winner, handed to Steve Coogan and Jeff
Pope for the popular PHILOMENA, honoured a true story about family schism and
the anguish of estrangement.

Perhaps it is
symbolic of the Family of Man. Perhaps the Venice Film Festival saw, as it
often sees, the bigger world picture. We are all
victims or victims-in-waiting of a kind of domestic abuse. We live in a
world-household where flying saucepans are potentially nuclear and where
parent-child brutality is writ large as despotic leaders knocking their
peoples around. Welcome to Earth, a planet always mirrored in miniature –
perfectly proportioned and painstakingly accurate – at the annual Venice Film
Festival. Who would be without it?

My gondola
for next year, please.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH
THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD
CINEMA.